A weird-neighbor story, for your amusement

Vintage Max, on our street.

So, I didn't mean to bum out everyone yesterday morning, especially on a post-vacation Monday morning. I just blog it as I think it. As repentance, I offer up this juicy tidbit.

For as long as we've lived in our house (six years now), the neighbor to the right of us has barely said hello. A guy in his mid-fifties who was always puttering around in his backyard. There was a woman living with him for a few years, then suddenly I never saw her anymore. From what we could see through the shrubbery, his backyard looked like a holy mess, with filled garbage bags lying everywhere. Once, he dumped all these empty alcohol bottles in the little patch of woods across the street from our house, and he got caught and received a citation. Like I said, weird. Very.

Anyway, he moved out last month and a sweet, 100-percent normal elderly couple moved in. On Sunday, I noticed two police cars on our street. I organized a neighborhood watch several years ago, after there was a robbery down the block, and I'm supposed to send e-mail alerts if there's any criminal activity. I called the police dispatcher to see what was up. "Nothing criminal, just an ongoing investigation," he told me.

Cut to last night. I get home late from work because of a delayed train. "The man next door stopped by," Paulet tells me. "He said not to be nervous, there's a police investigation going on because they found some human bones buried in his backyard."

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOK.

I practically sprint next door. The couple's grandkids were playing in the back of the house and found some bones that seemed human. Cops came by. Then they found a pacifier buried under the deck which, my neighbor said, "Made the cops go crazy." Said bones have been sent out for DNA testing. They'll know the results in a few weeks.

There you have it, a little Desperate Housewives mystery in my neighborhood. But who doesn't have some story about a bizarro neighbor?